9 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas’

French writer Jules Verne spent much of his literary career penning entries in his 54-volume strong Voyages Extraordinaires series. One of his best-known books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers), was the sixth entry in the collection, and was first serialized in Magasin d’Éducation et de récréation between March 1869 and June 1870.

The story follows Professor Pierre Aronnax as he goes on an undersea adventure aboard Captain Nemo’s Nautilus—an at-the-time futuristic submarine. To celebrate the 155th anniversary of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, here are nine things you might not know about the iconic sci-fi story.

1. The Nautilus was inspired by a real-life experimental submarine.
2. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was originally called Journey Under the Waters.
3. Verne’s publisher forced him to cut Captain Nemo’s backstory so as not to hurt sales in Russia.
4. In addition to being inspired by a real submarine, Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Seas also inspired the creation of a submarine.
5. English translations of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas butchered the story …
6. … and contributed to the misunderstanding that the titular 20,000 leagues refers to depth, rather than distance.
7. When Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was published, the existence of the giant squid hadn’t been officially confirmed.
8. Real scientists and explorers are mentioned in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
9. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas influenced the avant-garde movement and the steampunk subgenre.

The Nautilus was inspired by a real-life experimental submarine.

Verne’s plans to write an aquatic adventure novel date back to at least 1865, when fellow author George Sand wrote of the novel in a letter, “you will soon lead us into the depths of the sea and you will make your characters travel in these diving devices that your science and your imagination can afford to perfect.”

Two years later, Verne saw a model of the first mechanically-powered submarine—called the Plongeur—at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He then crafted his own literary submarine for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas called the Nautilus (likely after Robert Fulton’s hand-powered submarine from 1800).

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was originally called Journey Under the Waters.

From as early as 1866, Verne had provisionally titled the book Journey Under the Waters (Voyage sous les eaux). That remained the working title until at least a year before publication began, with a March 1868 letter to his father mentioning that he was “deep in ‘Journey under the Waters,’ ” and was “working on it with tremendous pleasure.”

Verne’s publisher forced him to cut Captain Nemo’s backstory so as not to hurt sales in Russia.

In Verne’s original draft of the novel, Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose wife and children were killed by Russian forces during the January Insurrection of 1863. But Verne’s editor and publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, insisted that he delete this backstory—and Nemo’s vengeful sinking of a Russian ship—for fear of hurting sales in Russia and offending the Russian government.

Verne attempted to argue his case against Hetzel’s belief that the sinking of the Russian ship was “an evil act” committed by “a man who kills for killing’s sake.” In the author’s view, Nemo’s family being murdered and his country’s occupation were valid reasons for revenge: “If that man doesn’t have the right to sink Russian frigates wherever he finds them, then revenge is but a word. In such a situation, I myself would sink unremorsefully.”

However, Verne reluctantly complied with Hetzel’s demand and obscured the details of Nemo’s tragic backstory, leading to the mysterious captain we know today who lost his family for unknown reasons and sinks a warship of (to the reader) an unknown nationality. In The Mysterious Island—serialized between 1874 and 1875—Verne finally revealed the character’s history, but with a significant change from his original idea: Nemo is an Indian Prince Dakkar who fought during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

In addition to being inspired by a real submarine, Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Seas also inspired the creation of a submarine.

Submarine inventor Simon Lake created the Argonaut, the first submarine to successfully operate at sea, and he credited his childhood reading of Twenty Thousand Leagues as his inspiration: “Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life.” Although Lake’s Argonaut wasn’t a recreation of Verne’s Nautilus, they did share a few similarities, such as ballast tanks and hydroplanes.

Lake’s successful 1898 voyage in his submarine—he traveled from Norfolk, Virginia, up to Sandy Hook, New Jersey—was praised by Verne, who said that while Twenty Thousand Leagues “is entirely a work of the imagination, my conviction is that all I said in it will come to pass. A thousand mile voyage in the Baltimore submarine boat is evidence of this.”

English translations of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas butchered the story …

Twenty Thousand Leagues was first translated into English in 1872, but it was deeply inaccurate—as were many of the subsequent translations. Not only were entire paragraphs of text—often the most scientific and political sections—sometimes cut out completely, but many egregious translation errors were made. For instance, in an 1873 translation, Verne’s “armé d’une lentille, il alluma un feu” (“armed with a magnifying lens, he started a fire”) was rendered as “provided with a lentil, he lighted a fire.”

While French readers considered Verne’s works to be for adults, in sci-fi author Brian W. Aldiss’s words, the English translations were “regarded as fit merely for boys.” It wasn’t until 1965 that an accurate English translation, by Walter James Miller, hit shelves—nearly a century after Twenty Thousand Leagues was first published. According to the 1976 edition, Miller’s version was a staggering 23 percent longer than the previous English translations.

… and contributed to the misunderstanding that the titular 20,000 leagues refers to depth, rather than distance.

The inaccurate English translations of the novel also aided the common misunderstanding of the 20,000 leagues in the title referring to the depth of the Nautilus, rather than the distance it travels. In 1876, the last word of the French title, Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, was translated as “Sea” rather than “Seas”—a mistake that was repeated for years and is still commonly used as the English title. Although “Under the Seas” can also be misunderstood, the plural gives a greater sense of the Nautilus traveling the globe.

Whether you’re dealing with standard or marine leagues, it’s physically impossible for the Nautilus to be 20,000 leagues deep. Twenty thousand marine leagues would be 60,000 nautical miles, and the deepest part of the ocean is around 35,876 feet (10,935 meters), or 5.9 nautical miles (6.8 statute miles). (Twenty thousand marine leagues would also be many times the Earth’s diameter.) It should also be noted that Verne was using the French lieue, which at that time equated to 4000 meters (rather than 5556 meters), so the Nautilus actually traveled 43,197 nautical miles.

When Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was published, the existence of the giant squid hadn’t been officially confirmed.

Although giant squid had been described by the ancient Greeks, their size and rarity led to them being thought of as mythical for hundreds of years. When Verne was writing Twenty Thousand Leagues, the existence of giant squid was still unverified and information on them was scant. His version of the giant cephalopod was inspired by the octopus in Victor Hugo’s 1866 Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la mer) and by the 1861 reports of the French ship Alecton capturing a giant squid (it broke in half while being hoisted aboard and fell into the sea).

Verne incorrectly gives the sea creature just eight arms (with no mention of the two much longer tentacles), but one of the book’s illustrations—which were done by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou—correctly depicts one of these longer appendages. While many attributes of the giant squid are accurately described in the book, their size is overestimated. Professor Pierre Arronax guesses the creature’s weight to be 4000–5000 pounds, but the largest giant squid on record so far weighed 485 pounds. Even colossal squid max out at 1091 pounds.

It was during the 1870s—soon after the publication of Twenty Thousand Leagues—that giant squid were finally confirmed as fact rather than fiction.

Real scientists and explorers are mentioned in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

Although Twenty Thousand Leagues is a work of science fiction, Verne also drew upon actual events and people. For instance, the recited details of the Alecton’s encounter with a giant squid are largely accurate, although the ship’s name is changed to Alector and its real-life Captain, Frédéric Bouyer, is renamed Bouguer.

Nemo also admires the work of oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, while Aronnax relates explorer Jean-François de Lapérouse’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe, as well as Jules Dumont d’Urville’s discovery of the expedition’s two wrecked ships. The Nautilus even visits the island of Vanikoro, where the ships had sunk.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas influenced the avant-garde movement and the steampunk subgenre.

Jules Verne’s works inspired a number of surrealist and avant-garde writers. “When Jules Verne lists all the names of fish over four pages in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, I feel as though I am reading a poem,” said Georges Perec, a member of the avant-garde group Oulipo. Perec’s constrained writing novel, Life: A User’s Manual (1978), sees a man go on a 20-year voyage around the world in a similar vein to Captain Nemo (who even gets a mention in the story).

Twenty Thousand Leagues has also had an impact on the steampunk subgenre, with Verne even being described as “the godfather of steampunk.” Nemo epitomizes the steampunk hero (or, rather, anti-hero), being an eccentric outsider with a passion for innovative technology (i.e. the Nautilus—which, when viewed through modern eyes, fits the retrofuturistic steampunk aesthetic). Nemo also appears as a character in some steampunk stories, including Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

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